For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Joanna Kavenna.
Photograph © Richard Saker for the Observer
Ellah Alfrey talks with Joanna Kavenna about wanderlust, genre-hopping and Nietzsche.
For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Joanna Kavenna.
Photograph © Richard Saker for the Observer
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Joanna Kavenna is the author of various works of fiction and non-fiction including The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love and A Field Guide to Reality. She was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013. Her latest novel is Zed. Photograph © A. Michaelis
More about the author →
‘We all now exist as avatars, on shining tiles in these cubist landscapes’
Joanna Kavenna discusses her all-too-familiar surveillance dystopia, Zed.
‘She was so understanding, so interesting, such an intellectual. She was also a wristwatch, but this hardly mattered.’
‘We are real in an unreal reality, which we’re told is really real and that we’re actually unreal.’
An excerpt from ZED, the forthcoming novel by Joanna Kavenna, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.
‘They slept curled together in a hammock, little scraps of fur, hearts beating madly.’ Joanna Kavenna on her pet rats, Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love.
‘My first name, Binyavanga, has always been a sort of barometer of public mood.’
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